Ellie Bowen Animation Journal

  Above is my final film with all the extras added. My final tweak came after I asked Mike if I could hold a frame in after effects because I wanted a longer pause before he popped his head round in the close up shot, and I could freeze the final frame and was finally left with this.  As in my formative review, this was a very up and down process that I took, and life got in the way at times, but I was very excited to both start and finish this project, whenever I was feeling good I felt promising thoughts about my final film. I genuinely like how it came out, even if it still looks a little scruffy. It has childish vibes but that's not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion and I'm happy to see it all moving together and flowing how I wanted it to. Again, it's been very different to what I've done before so it was a challenge and fun motivator for me. I'd like to do things differently next time, maybe using different software or using what I used this time more effi...

 My film felt like it was lacking something to make it feel professional looking, and my first thought was because it just cut off on the last frame. Originally I was just going to have it cut to black for a few seconds, but it didn't feel like it fit the vibe of the rest of the film so I made a cute little end card for after my final scene. I didn't know I was going to do this, but after I started hand writing the letters, I felt like it looked like that sort of "carved into wood" look you see in films set in the woods, which was a great accident to inspire me to continue doing the rest of the writing like that. So here is the film with the credit screen: Then I decided I wanted my film to be titled too. I was originally going to have something with "Nuts" in but it felt a bit crude for how sweet the film was. I asked my friends what they thought and graciously took the idea to use the word "Sciuridae" (the latin word for the family of rodents squ...

 I finished all my colouring and have started on compiling all my scenes together in After Effects. This is a program I'm not very good with, and haven't really used before so I had to have some guidance from Mike as I went along. My first problem I ran into was the fact that my composition was too short and it was oly letting me have 33 seconds of footage. After consulting Mike, I found where my composition settings were so I could make my work area longer and get everything in together.  Unfortunately, I was getting strange white flashes between some scenes, and I assumed there was some button I had to hold to get the scenes to snap together. I figured out it was shift, but it still wasn't working so I used the alpha button as Mike advised and it was deifnitely a problem with the scenes not being flush together. I zoomed in and found out I had been snapping them to the start of the scene following instead of the end of the scene prior, leaving weird gaps inbetween the las...

 Over the next few days I'll be hard-focusing colouring my film. I can't see myself having any issues, and I'll probably be able to copy-paste a few frames and layers in because of how I've reused motions from earlier scenes in later ones. I originally had my smarter squirrel be plain, but decided it would be better to have more of a distinction between them, and made my life a little harder by giving him markings. And I have a little comparison of the scene from the last post.   Things are going a lot better than they were and I'm excited to finish this project again.

 After speaking to Mike, it was decided it would be easier for me to work on every scene as a seperate file, and I could compile them all at the end into After Effects. My issue, however, was I'd done the whole film so far on one timeline. I spent a decent amount of time seperating each scene (a scene being anything between each cut) onto seperate canvases like so It got a little tricky when I had an animated portion in every scene (the leaf) but it was only animated at the end, so I waited until I started the colouring process to put those scenes on their own, so I had many clips that just consisted of a few seconds of animation. 

 Turns out I had a Windows Ink update that took control of my tablet and the pen drivers, editting how they were affecting software. All I had to do was disable that, according to Mike, Windows Ink messes with a lot of people's tablets in unsavoury ways so it was the first thing we tried and it thankfully fixed the problem.  Then, we did some extra work on after effects and how to use the components of my film differently through that. I seperated my animations and backgrounds so I just had an anmated clip and removed all the static imagery from it like so I converted my vectors, both animated and not into SWF files because they're flash's specialised files for moving animated vectors around, and since I'd used flash all of my work so far had been nice, crisp vector work. We had this rubbish, quick, no lines coloured backdrop placed into my scene to have a look at how the planes worked. This with the animated portion on top meant I could have the different layers at dif...

 Ran into some software issues that halted my progress, the following is the video I sent to Mike prior to our meeting to hopefully solve the problem.

 So I've been seeing squirrels when I've been out and about on walks, and noticed when they sit, their tails wrap in on themselves like this: The tail sort of sits flat against his back and curls over on itself, and I haven't really drawn the squirrels like that at all, instead I've had them sticking out like this: I promptly headed to look at some other squirrels online to compare and a lot of the red squirrels I saw sit with their tails completely down like so: I'm thinking that, because I'm using red squirrels, my little msitake will be ok? I believe they might have shorter tails than the grey squirrels I've been seeing everywhere which is why they don't always fold their tails like the grey one does, and that can excuse my poor tail-anatomy. Also, If their tails were super long and curled up I'd probably have found them a lot harder to animate, so perhaps it's just the bushiness of the tail that is represetnative of "squirrel" and n...

  I played around with the film and I've decided this is the perfect pacing for it. I think it has a strong balance of keeping something interesting on screen consistently and not being too fast to follow. As I finish up on the film I want to try to keep the pacing at this level because I think I've managed to get it down. I decided to remove the question marks I had next to the squirrel's head because I felt like the facial expressions were enough to convey how he was feeling. It was overkill to have a confused face and little bubbling question marks so I just took them out completely. Even when he's on the branch and the shot is zoomed out and the other squirrel is edging towards him, jsut having him completely still watching the other idiot hide behind a leaf is enough to show that he's just bewildered by what's going on. He promptly pushes the leaf out of the way, so it should be obvious to the audience that our smarter squirrel was never fooled by the leaf-...

  This version of my animatic has a couple more inbetweens than the first. I don't have much to say in terms of difficulties or technical issues since I've jsut been sticking to frame by frame and it's been working out fine. I'm getting more used to animate over the time I've been using it, althought I still have some questions about the way the tools work sometimes. Why does it change the line colours if I switch layers with certain tools selected? I don't ask it to do that, it'll just randomly force colour changes onto ALL of the lines on a layer to whatever colour I was previously using, and it's made differentiating between the two squirrel's colours a bit of a nightmare at some points. Other than that, though, I've generally just been tweaking and adding in frames. The additional inbetweens has slowed it down too, so it watches a little smoother now. I had a go at slowing it down considerably below by holding my frames for longer, too. I...

  This was meant to be my storyboard but drawn out into animate, however I got a little carried away with it and ended up with many more inbetweens than I originally planned- not necessarily a bad thing. There's some stills and weird movements from the squirrels in this, but it's supposed to just be my first draft and helps me see everything laid out and ready for me to go back over and refine. Also the pacing is super weird, I definitely need to work on that. Using my references from Muybridge has definitely helped, and I don't find that I'm needing to have every limb of the squirrel's movement animated out because they zip around so quickly, something I confirmed with Alan this week at the tutorial. It's probably going to be okay for me to have the squireels moving very quickly and not in an incredibly detailed way because it mimics how we think of squirrels in real life. They're very dynamic and flash from one position to the next because they're so f...

  This was my first attempt at drawing out the squirrel running. I used minimal frames and you can kind of tell what is happening here, but I could tell it looked very janky and off. The shape of the squirrel was definitely right, though, and using circles for the shoulder and thigh was a great idea because it helped me with  the stretch and squish of the squirrels movements. I didn't know if the pace could be changed to have it look better, since it would make the squirrel zip around like squirrels do. Much to my surprise, there was a set of Eadweard Muybridge photographs for a motion pic of a squirrel running. I've worked with reference to Muybridge before and it was infinitely helpful in seeing how each of the limbs move individually, and helped me get a good sense of dynamics on my own work. I redid my squirrel running test again with tweaks from the reference images and found it to be a lot nicer to watch and more realistic in it's movements. I especially love the flow...